October 5, 2017 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks.

Altmetric and the AAUP (Association of American University Presses) joined forces for a 3-month pilot to provide editorial, marketing, communications, and other departments in six university presses with “the opportunity to familiarize themselves with Altmetric data.” The presses will have access toAltmetric Explorer for Publishers, which will help them track attention on their books—the various sources, such as social networks and peer-review forums, where their content is being shared and commented on, as well as book reviews and use in teaching syllabi.

“The other day, I was working at the library catching up on old issues of Library Journal. In the May 15th issue, I read an interesting article titled ‘Tolerance is not enough.’ Here, the author made note that we can’t simply ‘tolerate’ differences; tolerance implies hardship. We need to celebrate them. This is especially important in the library if we want to create safe community spaces for the diverse groups that we serve.

“From there I flipped back to the ‘feedback’ section, which is akin to letters to the editor. There I saw a comment about politics in the library that was in stark contrast to the previous article. This reader referred to ‘Leftist Librarians’ as ‘snowflakes’ and mocked the idea of libraries as safe spaces. …

“The political climate of Canada—where I’m located—and [in the] US is different, but it’s not that different. The US election brought out the worst in many, even here, north of the border. It frustrates me that this reader likens literal safety to political discourse and ‘shelter from reality.’ I agree that libraries should be nonpartisan. People of different political views should be able to feel equally safe here. But we’re not talking about debating the intricacies of foreign policy—we’re talking about actual, literal safety.

“How presumptuous, using this reader’s phrase, is it to assume that all library users feel equally safe? That all library users feel the same privilege as this (no doubt) white man does? That self-care in the face of stress, fear, and adversity is not noble or necessary?”

The U.S. Copyright Office published the third edition of the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, which is the agency’s technical manual for staffers and a guidebook for authors, copyright licensees, courts, and others. It covers fundamental principles of copyright law, questions about accessing the Copyright Office’s public services, and the Copyright Office’s policies and procedures. This edition is designed to improve readability for both online and offline users and has updated hyperlinks for direct access to statutes, regulations, and resources from the agency’s website. Other improvements include clearer instructions for copyright applicants, additional guidance on recording notices of termination, and information on the agency’s new electronic system for the designation of agents.

In a Medium article, “A Response to Elsevier’s Insights Into Making the Transition to Open Access Possible,” Toby Green writes to Gemma Hersh, Elsevier’s VP of policy and communications, “You are quite correct, there is no international consensus for which open access model is best. However, waiting for consensus and taking an approach where ‘structural challenges need to be worked through by all stakeholders together’ brings to my mind Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot because, if the past two decades since [the] Budapest [Open Access Initiative] are anything to go by, waiting will only result in more pointless bickering, no definitive conclusion and open access will arrive, but only tomorrow.

“Your suggestion that a regional approach to gold open access might be a way forward pains me as much as Lucky’s soliloquy does the protagonists in the play. If there is one industry that is truly global in nature, it is scholarly publishing. This won’t be news to you, but if scientific articles are increasingly co-authored on an international basis and these papers tend to be more highly cited, then surely it is … nonsense that an article could be open in Europe but closed in Australia. A regional approach would also prolong inequality between the haves and haves not, which must be unacceptable at a time when digital has opened the way to bridging divides at almost no cost. …

“You are the world’s largest STM publisher, yet the insights you present show a surprising lack of ambition to take a lead in the transition to open access: you seem content to remain by your tree, looking at your boots muttering ‘is nothing to be done? …’”

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) announced the release of a toolkit for helping librarians with the creation and management of digital scholarship. Part of a National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) project by Megan Potterbusch, it has presentations to faculty members and librarians, resources for working with researchers, and project-structure/workspace examples in the OSF (Open Science Framework). Because it is built within OSF, the toolkit is openly available for collaboration and is open to additional contributions from anyone working on digital stewardship projects with researchers. Potterbusch’s project was a joint experience among ARL, the Center for Open Science (which produces the OSF), and the GW Libraries at George Washington University.

Yewno Discover extended its relationship with Cambridge University Press to continue indexing its journal articles and to begin indexing its ebooks, meaning all of the publishers’ digital content is now part of the knowledge discovery platform. According to the press release, “Yewno Discover maps over 600 million semantic connections among concepts that are extracted from the full text of academic content provided. Those connections link to over 120 million articles, books, and database assets.” This agreement gives Cambridge’s content more visibility, and it improves Yewno Discover’s effectiveness as a research tool.

SAGE introduced an “inclusive access” program, which allows students to access digital and print course materials before a class starts and for a discounted fee.

“SAGE Publishing is committed to supporting student success not only by publishing the highest-quality content from … expert authors, but also by providing this content in the formats that students prefer,” says Michele Sordi, SVP and head of U.S. college at SAGE. “Our goal with the inclusive access option is to increase affordability, accessibility, and achievement for students and to support instructors and institutions as they champion student success. We are encouraged by early results from the Inclusive Access initiative and look forward to partnering with universities to grow the program.”

RightsDirect, a subsidiary of Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), teamed up with Meteo, Inc.to integrate more than 1 million medical articles and citations from Meteo’s Medical Online subscription into RightFind, CCC’s content workflow solution. Rights to Meteo’s content will also be added to CCC’s Republication License Service. The partnership “will expand global sales of [Meteo’s] articles and help increase the company’s brand awareness for content aggregation to the worldwide market,” according to the press release. “Meteo content in RightFind is available to users now, with Japanese content rights coming to Republication License Service later this month.”

Ex Libris Group, a ProQuest company, is the first company in the library industry to achieve ISO 22301:2012 certification, the first ISO (International Organization for Standardization) standard “that focuses exclusively on business continuity management (BCM),” according to the press release. The standard pertains to business continuity and disaster preparedness, and its application to Ex Libris Group reaffirms “the company’s commitment to providing customers with a reliable, highly secure SaaS environment.”

Content from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global is now discoverable via Google Scholar. The organizations had previously partnered in 2015 to index millions of scholarly articles, and they have added nearly 500,000 full-text dissertations to the agreement. Google Scholar users will see the content in their library’s subscription collections. Libraries don’t need to do anything—linking and access to the dissertations is automatic. ProQuest users will be able to connect to the full text from a collection, and non-users will be directed to a page where they can purchase the title they need (they can see the first 24 pages for free).